Flashback: A Year Ago This Week on Tyner Blain [2006-06-30]

Use cases represent the activities that people do when interacting with a system to achieve their goals. Use cases are a very effective tool for communicating and documenting what a system is intended to accomplish. Formal use cases are use cases with a specific structure to represent the information. Knowing how to read a formal use case is important.

Michael on Product Management and Marketing has posted the first in his series of product management commandments – Know Thy Customer. He provides five tips on how to know your customer better. We extend his idea to include understanding our customers’ markets, and provide more tips. By analogy, this is the difference between a detective who studies a criminal and a profiler who seeks to understand a class of criminals.

There are 8 reasons we write use cases. Most of the benefits of documenting use cases come from communication, but all of the benefits depend upon the initial creation of the use case. The first step to determining the best way to create a formal use case is to understand the use case of creating use cases.

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Who Should Read Tyner Blain?

These articles are written primarily for product managers. Everyone trying to create great products can find something of use to them here. Hopefully they are helping you with thinking, doing, and learning. Welcome aboard!